Anger crept across Joe’s face, edging out any softness in his expression. “This is all about him, isn’t it?” He jerked his head toward the hall down which Eric had disappeared. “He finally decided he wants you? Is that it?”
“No.” Where on earth had that come from? “Eric and I are friends. That’s all. He has nothing to do with this. What happened with us is your fault.”
“Bullshit,” he spat. “I’ve seen the way he looks at you. I’ve heard the way you talk about him. Do you think I’m stupid?”
“Joe—”
Vibrating with fury, he glared down at her. “Are you stopping somewhere to spend the night at some hotel? Are you telling me nothing’s gonna happen then? You think I’m stupid enough to believe that whole setup’ll be platonic?”
Beyond outraged, she decided it was past time for him to leave. She crossed her arms over her chest. “Eric is my friend.” Somehow she kept her voice low and calm despite the furious rush of blood in her ears. “He’s been my friend for years, and he’ll always be my friend.”
“Even after I’m gone from your life, you mean.”
“You are gone from my life.”
Joe flinched and she felt a moment’s vindictive pleasure at hurting him a little when he’d hurt her so much. He dropped his head and made an incredulous, laughing sound, as though he couldn’t quite get over her foolishness. When he looked up again, his eyes glittered, hard and bitter.
“You’re naïve,” he told her.
“No, I’m not—”
“If you think that any straight man can look at that face—” his flashing gaze raked over her “—and that body without trying to get you in bed, then you don’t know a thing about men.”
“You’re wrong,” she said, stung to the core of her soul because she was no seductress and there was one straight man that’d never wanted her and never would, a man who was immune to whatever charms she possessed and had been for seventeen years. “Eric doesn’t want me.”
Joe flinched as though she’d sprayed him with mace, and, too late, she realized her mistake. “I didn’t mean—”
But Joe just laughed that same harsh, bitter laugh. “So everything would be different if he did want you, huh?”
“No. And it’s none of your business anyway.”
He stared her down and she blinked back the hot, unaccountable tears that stung her eyes. The painful silence lengthened until she wished she were anywhere else in the universe but here. She didn’t want this scene, didn’t want to talk anymore with this man and, most of all, didn’t want to explain again that she’d never turned Eric’s head, not even once.
“It’s time for you to leave,” she said flatly.
After giving her a long, searching look, he blinked and nodded. When he spoke again his voice was full of gravel. “I love you,” he told her. “I’ll always love you. This was the biggest mistake of my life.”
You got that right, she thought, turning her head away.
“Take care of yourself, Bella.”
With that, Joe turned to go. And as the door closed behind him she couldn’t muster up any feelings of sorrow, loss or forgiveness for the man who’d been such a big part of her life. All she could think was: good riddance.
An hour later, Eric slammed around the kitchen, making dinner and working himself into such a state of agitation that his clothes, skin and muscles felt tight enough to suffocate. It was as though he’d been shrink-wrapped inside layers of plastic that prevented him from thinking clearly or even taking a deep breath.
This misery was his own damn fault, really, for hanging in the doorway and listening to every faint syllable of what he sincerely hoped was the last conversation ever between Isabella and her ex-jerk. Eric had had no business eavesdropping and he knew it. When had an eavesdropper ever overheard anything good? Why hadn’t he known better?
Spying and eavesdropping were deeply shameful activities, and the guilt gnawed at his gut like a beaver with a fresh log and a dam to build. He should be hung by the thumbs for such a terrible transgression, and if Izzy kicked him out for violating her privacy, it’d be no less than he deserved. So, yeah, he was the scum of the earth, but he had much bigger problems to deal with than his regrettable lack of moral fiber.
Restless and frustrated, he went to the fridge, forgot what he’d meant to get, and, cursing, returned to the sink where he stared blankly at the shrimp in their colander. He reminded himself of the manatees in their tank at the Cincinnati Zoo—always swimming, never going anywhere.
Idiot. What the hell was his problem?
Glancing down the counter, he watched Izzy resolutely chop veggies for the salad and wondered if she was okay. After that jackass left a little while ago, Izzy had pretended she wasn’t crying and Eric pretended he didn’t see her red nose and eyes. Now he supposed they were both pretending they were having a perfectly normal evening together, the same as any other.
Hah.
Turning on the water, he began to clean the shrimp and tried to think. So he’d listened when he shouldn’t have. The question now was: what, if anything, was he going to do about what he’d heard? His mind came up blank except for a few random thoughts swirling like feathers on the wind. Each time he tried to grab one and examine it, he wound up batting it further away:
Isabella was his friend.
Isabella was leaving the country.
He didn’t want her to go.
Jasmine thought there was something between him and Isabella.
Joe thought there was something between him and Isabella.
Jasmine and Joe were wrong, of course. Nothing had ever happened between him and Izzy. No lingering goodbye kiss, no drunken night together after some raucous campus party, never even a longing glance. Their relationship had been as platonic as a date between Elton John and Ellen DeGeneres.
Until now…
No.
Muttering, he found a heavy pan, set it on the stove, and turned on the gas. There was no until now because nothing had changed or would change. If he repeated this mantra enough times, he’d surely believe it eventually.
Nothing had changed…Nothing had changed…Nothing had—
Except…something big had changed, hadn’t it? Something other than his fierce new awareness of Isabella as a woman. Forget the Africa thing; Johannesburg was a plane ride away for someone like him who had a private jet at his disposal. No, the real issue was someone wanting to marry Izzy.
Marriage was forever. Maybe Izzy loved that idiot. Maybe she’d sleep on it, wake up in the morning, forgive Joe and tell him yes.
Then she’d be a soon-to-be married woman, wouldn’t she? Married.
The thought sickened him, and feeling sick scared him.
God, it was hot in here. Turning down the burner, he poured olive oil and butter into the pan, wiped his brow, and tried to think. Why was the thought of Isabella getting married so unbearable? Hadn’t he always known that in the distant, indistinct future, someone would snatch her up? Didn’t he want her to marry someone, have a family and live happily ever after? Why was the thought of her building a life with a man like Joe so disturbing?
He and Joe were almost twins, physically and professionally.
Isabella could marry a man exactly like Eric.
Isabella had chosen a man exactly like Eric.
The last thought stuck in his mind, insisting that he acknowledge it even as he sautéed the shrimp. Isabella had chosen a man exactly like him. Slowly, bit by bit, feeling as though he was battling a great mental deficit, he tried to connect the dots.
Dot one: Joe was Isabella’s type.
Dot two: Joe and Eric were alike.
Dot three: if Joe and Eric were alike, and Joe was Isabella’s type, then, by extrapolation…Eric was also Isabella’s type.
Dot four…Dot four…
He struggled but couldn’t get to dot four no matter how hard he tried.
Looking around, he checked Izzy’s progress. Having finished with the sa
lad, she’d mixed up a batch of brownies and was getting ready to put them in the oven.
“Don’t forget to spray the pan,” he told her.
“What?” Izzy froze, the mixing bowl poised over the rectangular baking pan. As though waking from a trance, she glanced down and looked mildly surprised to find a bowl and spatula in her hands.
“Oh. Sorry.” She put the bowl down and reached for the cooking spray.
Eric turned back to the shrimp and stirred. His turmoil grew as other, more provocative thoughts came, crowding his brain to overflowing:
He was suddenly unattached. Isabella was suddenly unattached.
Why did those two things seem monumentally significant? They’d both been unattached at the same time before—hadn’t they? Yeah, he was sure they had. Well…maybe not.
Izzy had had a few long-term boyfriends, including some jerk named Al in college, and then she’d had long periods when he didn’t think she’d dated anyone, but he—well, to be honest, he generally had a flavor of the month, with next month’s flavor on the horizon. But right now he couldn’t think of another flavor he wanted to sample. Was that all there was? He really hoped not.
Taking the shrimp off the heat, he turned off the burner and shot Izzy a covert glance. With the brownies safely transferred to the oven, she was now enthusiastically licking the batter-covered spatula and had a smudge of chocolate on the tip of her nose. Something tightened in Eric’s chest as he watched her.
God, he didn’t want her to go. Not to Africa, not to be Joe’s wife.
He wrestled with the Pandora’s Box he didn’t want to open but couldn’t leave alone. No possible good could come of what he wanted to say next, but he couldn’t not say it.
“You’re pretty messed up about that Joe thing, aren’t you?”
Izzy hesitated and then moved to the sink to rinse the brownie bowl. “I’ll be okay.”
This threw him for a loop. Could you be okay after someone you cared about cheated on you? Having never been in love—or anything close to it—he didn’t know how these things worked, although his cousin Andrew (two years ago they’d discovered that Andrew wasn’t technically his cousin, but Eric still thought of him as such) and his wife, Viveca, had seemed to fall in love pretty quickly, if not instantaneously, and he sure didn’t think Andrew would be okay if Viveca cheated on him.
“You’re better off without him. You know that, right?”
“I know,” she murmured, scrubbing the bowl clean with a soapy brush.
“And what’s this Africa business?”
She whipped around to glare at him with narrowed eyes, splashing bubbly water all down the front of her clothes. “You listened?”
Eric thought of doing the whole, well, I might have accidentally heard a word or two while I was minding my own business in the bedroom thing, but why bother?
“Yeah.”
“Unbelievable.” Defiant and outraged, she flapped a hand toward one corner of the living room, where a stack of flattened cardboard boxes sat, presumably waiting to be packed with her belongings. “I want to teach at the girls’ school in Johannes—”
“You already did that in college, Izzy—”
The funniest little look shot across her face and disappeared so quickly he felt sure he’d imagined it. “That was just one semester, for an internship.”
“—and people don’t just up and move to South Africa.”
“I do.”
“Why?”
“This is what I’m doing with my life.”
“Why?”
“Because those children are special and I can help them. I can make a difference in their lives.”
“But you’re a teacher here. You belong here.”
“I’m needed there. Kids here want a new DVD or the next computer game. Kids there want to learn. To have a chance. And many of them have lost their parents to AIDS. I can do the most good there.”
Eric floundered, at a complete loss. For the first time in their relationship, he couldn’t understand Isabella. Her calm tone and determined expression told him he was getting nowhere, and his frustration level rose into the red zone. Maybe it was time to try a different tactic.
“And what about your personal life? What about getting married one day? Are you putting that on hold forever?”
She shrugged. “My life is leading me down a different path.”
“A different path?”
A hissing sound distracted him and he discovered that the pasta was boiling over. Wonderful. He snatched the pot off the stove and burned his hand in the process. Cursing, he nudged Izzy out of her spot in front of the sink and poured off the water. The resulting cloud of steam only made him hotter.
He glared at her, this woman who was systematically ruining what was supposed to be several relaxing days of fun. “What’re you—a nun now?”
“I don’t think I’m ever getting married,” she told him.
Eric froze. That he understood. This statement sounded so unlike Isabella that a chill came over him. Looking at her over his shoulder, he swallowed hard and wondered why the hell Izzy’s position on marriage mattered so much to him.
It wasn’t like he was in the market for a wife. Why would he ever get married? So he could turn into a whipped, stoop-shouldered man like his father and his wife could turn into a Stepford Wife like his mother? No thank you. Not any time in the foreseeable future, if ever.
And yet…Izzy’s determination to remain single still bothered him, and that was the weirdest thing. He couldn’t just drop the subject, no matter how much he wanted to.
“Never say never, Iz.”
She didn’t answer.
In a day full of disturbing events, this small silence was the most troubling. He studied her.
Maybe it was the rigidity in her shoulders, or the flatness in those eyes that normally sparkled like the Hope Diamond. Maybe it was the utter lack of hope on her face, when she was a person who made Pollyanna look almost like a gloomy pessimist. Whatever it was, he didn’t like it.
Still…it gave him the answer he needed:
Nothing. He would do nothing about his sudden attraction to Isabella. He would keep it to himself, and he would get over it. He would never—never—do anything to hurt her or their friendship, nor would he rock her boat right now when she was so vulnerable after Joe’s infidelity.
Izzy had enough on her plate without her best friend trying to get in her panties, and she didn’t take breakups well anyway. Back in college, when that idiot Al dumped her, she’d taken off for that semester in Africa in a clear knee-jerk reaction.
Hell, for all Eric knew, history was repeating itself here: Joe broke her heart, so she was leaving the country. Running and hiding in Africa, just like she’d done before. Maybe that was the only coping mechanism she had. Whether that was the case or not, the last thing she needed now was Eric sniffing after her.
No matter how hard it was, and he suspected it was going to be very hard, he would keep his feelings under wraps. Doing anything else would be unfair and…dishonorable.
His silent vow made, Eric felt much better because he’d chosen the right path. And much worse because he wanted her in his arms with an aching desperation. He felt empty and wrecked.
He didn’t think he could shake it off any more than he could pitch for the Yankees. But…he would try his damnedest.
“Let’s eat,” he said. Case closed.
After dinner and cleanup, Eric talked her into watching The Empire Strikes Back again—it’s the best movie in the entire series, no question, he always said—and then they said their good-nights and Eric disappeared down the hall into the guest bedroom.
Inside her own bedroom, Isabella lit her fresh-linen-scented aromatherapy candle, took a shower, threw on her matching pink cotton tank and boxers, and collapsed onto the bed with the remote. As usual, the pillow-arranging ritual—a girl could never have too many fluffy pillows—took several minutes, but finally she relaxed onto the down-covered heaven
that was her comfy duvet.
Zeus, his eyelids droopy from a long day full of play, trotted into the room from parts unknown with his enormous blue plaid dog sleeping pillow—the thing was easily twice his size—gripped in his teeth. He dragged it to his corner between the nightstand and the wall, yapped once and ran out of the room again. Isabella smiled after him. A minute later he was back, this time carrying his favorite transitional object, a fuzzy pink floppy-eared bunny called Fluffles. Isabella watched while he arranged Fluffles on the pillow and then collapsed in his usual position, with his head resting on Fluffles’s butt.
Isabella had just sighed with contentment, flipped to the Food Network to watch Paula Deen and was in the process of slathering her legs with her Bath & Body Works cream—Dancing Waters, of course—when Eric tapped lightly on the door.
“Come in,” she called without thinking, her hands gliding up her bent right leg.
Eric walked in and opened his mouth to speak, but the words died on his lips when he saw what she was doing. To her complete astonishment, he studied her with a burning lust he didn’t bother trying to hide.
Chapter 4
A warning bell rang in her mind—it was late, she was wearing skimpy jammies, they were in her bedroom, he was a man, she was a woman, they’d been drinking wine—but then time ground to a halt and it was too late for any remedial measures, like sliding her legs under the duvet.
She looked right into his eyes and delicious goose bumps erupted over every inch of her skin. Her heart stopped and then began the kind of furious gallop that made people reach for the phone to call 9-1-1. Stunned and frozen, she waited, not breathing, to see what Eric would do. The stark hunger in his face and intense interest in those dark eyes were not expressions she’d ever seen before, but, God help her, she liked seeing them now.
This was not Eric her friend. She knew that right away. This Eric was a complete stranger, someone she’d never before laid eyes on, a being as foreign to her as an alien just arrived on his spaceship. This was Eric the man, and he looked like he was excruciatingly aware of her as a woman, for the first time in their relationship.
Road to Seduction (Kimani Romance) Page 3
